Reading difficulties and disabilities present serious and potentially lifelong challenges. Children who do not read well are more likely to be retained a grade in school, drop out of high school, become a teen parent, or enter the juvenile justice system. Building on the extant research and seminal studies, including the National Reading Panel and…

Problems facing African American students with special needs are numerous and complex. Although processes and procedures are in place to properly serve these students, far too many become ensnared in webs of bureaucracy and benign neglect. This article examines African American students? experiences with special education in Milwaukee Public…

A strong body of research in South Africa focuses on the in-school aspects of school improvement and the role that school principals play in establishing organizational structures to support teaching and learning, develop teacher capacity, and build a school culture conducive to academic performance. However, researchers have paid little attention…

The assimilation and synthesis of knowledge is essential for students to be successful in chemistry, yet not all students synthesize knowledge as intended. The study used the Learning Preference Checklist to classify students into one of three learning modalities--visual, auditory, or kinesthetic (VAK). It also used the Kolb Learning Style…

The relationship among the Piagetian concepts of identity, seriation, and transitivity was explored with preschool subjects. (JMB)

Experiment 1 examined the relationship between dimensional preference and proportion of optional reversal shifts among adults. Experiment 2 examined dimensional preference and shift behaviors using an intradimensional-extradimensional shift paradigm. The results indicate that adults show the same type of behavior previously throught to…

Examined the relationship of newborns' 1-minute Apgar scores to their 8-month Bayley mental and motor scores and to 8-month classifications of their development as normal, suspect, or abnormal. Also investigated relationships between Apgar scores and race, longevity, and birth weight. (JMB)

Reviews the idea of critical readiness periods for both language learning and cognitive development and relates it to mental subnormalities. (Author/SDH)

Research indicates that there are physical and social, and possibly cognitive, differences between left-handers and right-handers. The three substantive sections of this colloquium paper cover brain functions, theories pertaining to the genesis of handedness, and cognitive development as related to handedness. Section 1 provides a brief…

A study was made to follow up on questions about the conception of preconventional moral reasoning in Kohlberg's cognitive development theory. Based on earlier findings, the following hypotheses were formulated: (1) children will express genuine fairness and interpersonal concerns at the level of preconventional moral reasoning; (2) while…

The paper critically analyzes the research and promotional literature on J. Guilford's Structure of Intellect (SOI) model as it relates to the cognitive functioning of gifted students and evaluates the implications of this analysis for the counselor's role in the identification and programming of gifted students. The review is written from…

When Piaget ascribed the origin of knowledge to action, he distanced his theory from most other theories of the origins of mind. As a result, Piaget's conception of mental action has been quite controversial. Piaget's recent, functionalist revisions emphasize procedures and their role in the development of structures. In the new view, structures…

The objectives of this paper are (1) to present the relationship of play to language and cognition, (2) to describe the stages of play and discuss recent literature about the characteristics of play, and (3) to describe the use of play with the multifaceted goals of cognition, pragmatics, semantics, syntax, and morphology as an intervention…

The paper describes ways in which tools, or aids, can promote the interaction of mentally retarded persons with their environment. A classification of these aids is proposed according to psychological characteristics (such as senses, intelligence, knowledge, decision making, and action) as well as types of interaction (such as comprehension,…

The purpose of this research was to examine 18- to 30-month-old children's use of scripts for representing common events. A script is defined as a model that specifies the roles and props appropriate to an event and identifies a sequence of acts for achieving the goal defined by the event. Two aspects of script knowledge were investigated: (1) the…